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Fisher rips Patrick on Evergreen

Sentinel & Enterprise

Updated:
06/03/2014 06:34:07 AM EDT

By Gintautas Dumcius

State House News Service

BOSTON -- Republican candidate for governor Mark Fisher on Monday dinged the Patrick administration over public investments in Evergreen Solar, a renewable-energy company at Devens that went bankrupt after tax breaks, before shortly pivoting to praising the administration's deregulation of the auto-insurance market.

Fisher's comments, offered at a forum with his primary opponent, Charlie Baker, came as he sat a few feet away from a former Patrick administration official who worked on both initiatives: Daniel O'Connell, who served as Gov. Deval Patrick's economic-development chief for two years, at the start of the administration.

Saying that he wouldn't "pander" to industries or certain regions of the Bay State, Fisher said the state sent $56 million in two years "down the tubes" to Evergreen Solar, which filed for bankruptcy in 2011.

"This is what happens when government gets involved, and the free market should decide this thing," Fisher said.

O'Connell, who is now president of a council of chief executives called the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, defended the state's investment in Evergreen Solar.

He told the News Service after the event that it was a "good bet from what we knew at the time."

"Evergreen was a situation where an entity created the jobs that they had promised to create, built the facility out at Devens, and then were impacted by world economic conditions in the solar-technology area and the making of solar panels," he said.

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"The Chinese government decided to heavily subsidize solar-panel construction in order to dominate the world market, and they were selling it at below-cost pricing throughout the world. Evergreen could not compete at that pricing level despite their superior technology."

O'Connell noted that Fisher, a Shrewsbury Republican, spoke positively of the deregulation of the auto-insurance marketplace, which went into effect in 2008.

In answering a question about the state's health-insurance market, Fisher said health-insurance companies from outside the state should be allowed to compete, as in the auto-insurance market after reforms here.

"Our insurance premiums went down 13 percent," Fisher said. "The same thing can happen with health insurance. More competition is a great thing."

O'Connell said deregulation has led to "savings in the billions of dollars" in the last five to six years.

"That is an example where government getting out of the way paid off for consumers, and I don't think that's a Republican or Democratic concept," O'Connell said. "I think both parties are looking for ways to have government play less of a role when the competitive private-sector environment can bring benefits to ratepayers, residents of the commonwealth."

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